Today, the economy is growing quickly, and many companies have complained of difficulties in finding enough workers, suggesting that the United States might be closer to full employment than standard measures propose.

“We’re not beyond full employment at this point, but a number of people are predicting that we will be, and there’s very little question that we are experiencing a big surge in demand,” said Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist and former Fed vice chairman.

But there are obvious differences between the two periods. The 1960s saw historically low unemployment while the current economy is still missing millions of jobs. According to many standard measures, the recovery remains fragile enough that government spending should lead to faster job growth, not more inflation. Plus, fiscal stimulus will likely slow with time as pandemic-era programs such as enhanced unemployment benefits end.

Supply shocks: Then it was oil, now it’s computer chips.

In the 1960s, an overheating economy gradually pushed up prices, but it was in the 1970s when inflation really took off. Inflation jumped to 12 percent in late 1974, then moderated, and hit a peak of more than 14 percent in early 1980.

The cumulative effects of that much inflation were eye-popping. In January 1970, $100 would have been able to buy as many goods and services as $280 could buy in January 1985. By comparison, $100 of purchases in 2005 would only have cost $135 by 2020.

The immediate culprit, in both big 1970s spikes, was oil. The Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 and the Iranian revolution of 1979 both contributed to an oil slump, leading to price spikes and gas shortages, which in turn pushed up prices elsewhere in the economy. Shortages in commodities including lumber and agricultural goods also contributed.

Oil prices are also rising now, jumping higher this week after talks between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies failed to reach a deal to ramp up production — but the situation is not as dire as the disruptions half a century ago. The economy is also facing snarls as it reopens and a dearth of computer chips is pushing up prices for video game systems and used cars. The Biden administration, much like the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, has been examining what it can do to ease the bottlenecks, including creating a task force to look into disruptions affecting construction, transportation, semiconductor production and agriculture.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/economy/inflation-redux.html

Local officials, especially Democrats, have tried to leverage at least some of the windfall to address chronic social and economic problems that the coronavirus exacerbated.

After a series of community meetings in Detroit, Mayor Mike Duggan and the City Council opted for a plan that divided the city’s $826 million payout roughly in half, with about $400 million going to recoup Covid-19 losses, and $426 million to an array of job-creation programs, grants for home repairs and funding to revitalize blighted neighborhoods.

In Philadelphia, officials are considering using $18 million of the new aid to test a “universal basic income” pilot program to help poor people. That is among the uses specifically suggested in the administration’s guidance. Several other big cities, including Chicago, are considering similar plans.

The Cherokee Nation, which is receiving $1.8 billion of the $20 billion set aside for tribal governments, is replicating the law’s signature initiative — direct cash payments to citizens — by sending $2,000 checks to around 400,000 members of the tribe in multiple states.

The $350 billion program has led to legal battles, with officials in many Republican-led states fighting one of the few restrictions placed on use of the money, a prohibition against deploying it to subsidize tax cuts, and partisan clashes erupting over which projects should have been given priority.

And the cash has spawned partisan conflict. Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, a Republican, announced this month that the state would use only a fraction of the approximately $1 billion it was expected to receive on emergency expenditures this year, and would discuss how to use the rest.

“These are dollars borrowed by Congress from many generations yet to come,” he said in a statement this spring.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/us/politics/stimulus-bill-usa.html

Some celebrity endorsements of cryptocurrencies have run into trouble. In 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission cautioned that some famous people were hyping the virtual currency sales known as initial coin offerings without disclosing that they had been paid to promote them. The commission has since settled charges against the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., the music producer DJ Khaled and the actor Steven Seagal.

Social media influencers and e-sports stars have also been linked to shady cryptocurrency schemes, accused of pumping up coins just before their value crashes.

Coin Cloud’s chief marketing officer, Amondo Redmond, said he hoped Mr. Lee’s stature would help elevate the industry by delivering something “more than just cool creative, but that is really at the forefront of digital currency becoming mainstream.”

“It’s more than just adding a celebrity face,” he said.

Mr. Lee, who won an Oscar in 2019 in the best adapted screenplay category for “BlacKkKlansman,” has worked on ads for Capital One, Uber and, most famously, Nike. In the 1980s and 1990s, he directed and starred in commercials for Air Jordans, playing his cinematic alter ego Mars Blackmon opposite Michael Jordan.

“That was lightning in a bottle,” Mr. Lee said from a flight bound for the Cannes Film Festival, where he is the first Black person to lead the festival jury.

He declined to say how much he had been paid for the Coin Cloud commercial, but noted that “if anyone’s known my body of work over the last four decades, you kind of know about the way I see the world, and when they approached me, it fit in line.”

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to highlight financial disadvantages for people of color, Mr. Lee hopes to promote cryptocurrency as neutral to race, gender, age and other identifying characteristics.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/business/media/cryptocurrency-seeks-the-spotlight-with-spike-lees-help.html

Ioana Marinescu, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed data on 8,000 specific labor markets with two co-authors and found that when a job market was heavily concentrated among a few employers, it resulted in a 5 percent to 17 percent decline in wages.

But she said regulators tend to be wary of trying to block a merger on the grounds of its potential labor market impact because of a lack of legal precedent.

“Legally we’re on firm ground, but it may or may not be seen that way by some particular judge who has this on their desk,” Professor Marinescu said. “That creates a risk for the agency that doesn’t like the idea they might lose a case.”

She said that having pressure from the White House to pursue those legal theories would help, but that congressional legislation explicitly charging antitrust regulators with focusing on labor market conditions would help more.

There has been some bipartisan discussion on Capitol Hill about reining in noncompete agreements, particularly after the emergence of some outrage-stoking stories. (Sandwich shops and hair salons contractually barred workers from going to a competitor, for example.) These disputes tend to pit incumbent businesses — who don’t want their workers to be able to quit with potentially valuable information — against start-ups who want more ability to hire people at will.

Occupational licensing is also an area with potential for bipartisan agreement, uniting those who want more widespread labor market opportunity with those opposed to excessive regulation. Many more jobs require occupational licenses than in decades past, and typically a license in one state is not easily transferable to another, potentially limiting workers’ ability to move to places where they can earn more. This is particularly problematic for military families, who typically have no choice but to move regularly.

Still, there are potential negative effects with the Biden approach. By creating a barrier to entry for workers entering a field, licensing may also keep wages higher for existing workers in those jobs, meaning some people may stand to lose if requirements are revoked. Moreover, research by Peter Q. Blair of Harvard and Bobby Chung of the University of Illinois suggests that women and racial minorities experience less of a pay gap in fields that involve occupational licenses.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/upshot/biden-executive-order-workers.html

Policymakers at the Federal Reserve have said they expect the increase in inflation to be short-lived, and they are unlikely to change that view based on an increase in energy prices, which are often volatile even in normal times, said Jay Bryson, chief economist at Wells Fargo.

But if rising oil prices lead consumers and businesses to believe that faster inflation will continue, that could be a harder problem for the Fed. Economic research suggests that prices of things that consumers buy often, such as food and gasoline, weigh particularly heavily on their expectations for inflation. With public opinion surveys showing increasing concern about inflation, rising oil prices increase the risk of a more lasting shift in expectations, said David Wilcox, a former Fed economist who is now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

“I don’t expect the price of oil to be the last straw on the camel’s back, but it is another straw on a camel’s back that’s already carrying a fair amount of baggage,” Mr. Wilcox said. “There is a much greater risk today of an inflationary psychology taking hold than I would have said three to five years ago.”

Republicans have seized on rising prices to criticize Mr. Biden’s energy policies, including his decision to cancel permits for the Keystone XL oil pipeline and his pause on selling new oil leases on federal lands, a move that a federal judge has blocked.

“Bad policy is already creating conditions like higher gasoline prices that we haven’t seen in a very long time,” Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, wrote in an opinion essay last week. (Energy experts say Mr. Biden’s policies have had no meaningful impact on oil prices.)

Ms. Psaki noted that Mr. Biden had consistently opposed an increase in the federal gas tax, which some Republican senators and business groups had advocated to help fund spending on infrastructure. The deal Mr. Biden reached with a bipartisan group of senators last month did not include a gas tax increase.

“Ensuring Americans don’t bear a burden at the pump continues to be a top priority for the administration writ large,” Ms. Psaki said. “That’s one of the core reasons why the president was opposed — vehemently opposed — to a gas tax and any tax on vehicle mileage, because he felt that would on the backs of Americans. And that was a bottom-line red line for him.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/business/economy/gas-oil-biden-economy.html

Back office employees at a different location, in Costa Rica, described the partial collapse of the company’s leave systems early in the pandemic, leading to problems like halted benefits for Mr. Castillo.

Data obtained through public records showed that Amazon’s overall work force was largely Black and Latino, but internal documents revealed that Black workers at JFK8 were disproportionately fired.

After Ms. Santos, the worker fired for T.O.T., applied for unemployment, Amazon contested her benefits. In an obscure New York administrative court, the company filed internal policy memos that provided a rare inside glimpse of the T.O.T. system.

After almost 200 interviews, a picture emerged of a company that “seemed far more precise with packages than people,” Ms. Kantor said. Amazon had tried to grow its business quickly by creating a giant semi-automated machine for hiring and managing — but that system often stumbled.

Ms. Weise was able to confirm that while the company boasted of job creation, turnover at the warehouses was roughly 150 percent a year — a figure never reported before — meaning Amazon had to replace the equivalent of its entire warehouse work force every eight months.

That number, and the entire project, took on deeper meaning when David Niekerk, the architect of Amazon’s warehouse human resources system, told her the turnover was more or less by design. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, had sought to avoid an entrenched work force, fearing laziness and a “march to mediocrity.” So upward mobility and raises for warehouse workers were limited.

As Ms. Kantor wrote and Ms. Ashford continued to report, Ms. Weise led a delicate, six-week effort to confirm the voluminous information in the story with Amazon and garner its responses. By then, the company had provided some input, including a tour of JFK8 by the general manager and an interview with Ofori Agboka, head of human resources for the warehouses, who defended Amazon but acknowledged that the company had leaned too heavily on technology and self-service.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/insider/amazon-workers-investigation.html

“You can pull a less-skilled worker in and have them adapt to our system much easier,” said Ryan Hillis, a Meltwich vice president. “It certainly widens the scope of who you can have behind that grill.”

With more advanced kitchen equipment, software that allows online orders to flow directly to the restaurant and other technological advances, Meltwich needs only two to three workers on a shift, rather than three or four, Mr. Hillis said.

Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.

“If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?” Professor Warman said. Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he added.

The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a 375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.

Other companies in the industry are doing the same. Jennifer Brogan, a spokeswoman for Stop Shop, a grocery chain based in New England, said that technology allowed the company to better serve customers — and that it was a competitive necessity.

“Competitors and other players in the retail space are developing technologies and partnerships to reduce their costs and offer improved service and value for customers,” she said. “Stop Shop needs to do the same.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/business/economy/automation-workers-robots-pandemic.html

The online job site Indeed surveyed 5,000 people in and out of the labor force and found that child care responsibilities, health concerns, vaccination rates and a financial cushion — from savings or public assistance — had all affected the number looking for work. Many employers are desperate to hire, but only 10 percent of workers surveyed said they were urgently seeking a job.

And even among that group, 20 percent said they didn’t want to take a position immediately.

Aside from ever-present concerns about pay and benefits, workers are particularly interested in jobs that allow them to work remotely at least some of the time. In a survey of more than 1,200 people by the staffing company Randstad, roughly half said they preferred a flexible work arrangement that didn’t require them to be on site full time.

Some employers are getting creative with work arrangements in response, said Karen Fichuk, chief executive of Randstad North America. One employer changed the standard shift to match the bus schedule so employees could get to work more easily. Others adjusted hours to make it easier for parents with child care demands.

Health and safety concerns are also on the minds of workers whose jobs require face-to-face interactions, the survey found.

But some people are reluctant to rejoin the labor force because of the quality and the pay of the work available, said Michelle Holder, an economist at John Jay College in New York.

“We don’t have a shortage of people to work,” she said. “What we don’t have are decent jobs.”

Jeanna Smialek and Ben Casselman contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/business/economy/june-2021-jobs-report.html

Retailers, day care providers and warehouses posted gains as well. Temporary jobs, which can be a bellwether for the broader labor market, also grew, partly reversing unexpected declines in the previous two months.

Overall payroll gains in April and May fell below expectations and fueled worries that the labor market’s recovery was disappointingly slow. Revisions for those months, included in the report on Friday, added only 15,000 to previously reported totals.

The stronger-than-expected increases for June, though, helped blunt some of the worries about the pace of hiring and gave President Biden the opportunity to claim credit for the progress. “Our economy is on the move,” he said in remarks from the White House.

The June figures are unlikely to allay the concerns of small-business owners and managers who complain about the difficulty finding workers. Nearly half report that they cannot fill openings, according to a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Business.

The competition for workers has pushed up wages. Average hourly earnings climbed 3.6 percent in the year through June and 0.3 percent over the month. Low-wage workers seem to be the biggest beneficiaries of the bump in pay.

Ms. Frankiewicz of ManpowerGroup said the rise of “superemployers” like Amazon and Walmart was making it even more difficult for small and medium-size businesses to attract workers. In the summer of 2019, the top 25 employers had 10 percent of the open jobs, she said, while “today 10 employers do.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/business/economy/june-2021-jobs-report.html

The fact that employment is rebounding more strongly for a demographic group that is often at a labor market disadvantage, paired with rising wages, helps support the White House’s view that President Biden’s policies and the healing economy are giving people more power over their economic fates.

“Today’s job news brought us something else to celebrate,” Mr. Biden said during remarks at the White House after the data were released.

“That kind of competition in the market doesn’t just give workers more ability to earn higher wages,” he said. “It gives them the power to demand to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace. More jobs, better wages. That’s a good combination.”

The jobs numbers were also a welcome reprieve for an administration that has been surprised by, and criticized for, weak job gains in previous months. Job gains fell short of analyst expectations in May and April, prompting criticism from Republicans, who said the $1.9 trillion economic aid bill the president signed in March was holding back the recovery — by extending supplemental benefits for unemployed workers through September, which some businesses blame for difficulties hiring workers — and stoking rapid inflation.

On Thursday, Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee taunted Mr. Biden in advance, in a news release headlined: “After two underwhelming jobs reports, President Biden’s June report is make or break.”

The report’s details supported the idea that workers have more bargaining power. Average hourly earnings climbed by 0.3 percent between May and June, matching what economists in a Bloomberg survey had expected. Coming on the heels of two even stronger months, the gain signaled that companies are paying up to hire.

Some reopening-affected sectors showed an especially strong performance: Workers in leisure and hospitality jobs who are not supervisors saw pay pop by a striking 2.3 percent between May and June. Those data confirm other evidence that workers have the upper hand in the reopening economy. The Conference Board’s index showing that jobs are “plentiful” has soared higher in recent months, people are quitting at higher rates, and people report looking for higher wages before accepting a position.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/business/economy/jobs-economy-covid.html